Film Review - A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (PG)

I'm here to interview you, Mister Rogers.

I was channel-hopping on a family holiday to Florida, when I first encountered Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. What was a UK teen to make of this show and its presenter - a cardigan-wearing guy who strolled on-set and amiably mumbled an upbeat song to camera, while putting on canvas sneakers? The whole thing seemed so weirdly creaky and unfashionable that it made me laugh. Little did I realise that I was watching a solid gold American TV icon. Fred Rogers - an ordained minister with a line in child psychology, who for decades hosted a show dedicated to helping young children process all the turbulent emotions that were brewing within them at that early age. To many he was more than a presenter - he was a gently-spoken super-hero and that cardy was his cape. (He'd have hated being labelled a 'super-hero' too.)

(The real Mister Rogers.)

Marielle Heller's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - the title is lifted from that upbeat song of Fred's - is more ingenious than the biopic you might have expected. Inspired by an Esquire magazine article by Tom Junod, the film tells the story of the fictional Lloyd Vogel, an embittered journalist whose job draws him into Fred Roger's extraordinary orbit. Welsh actor Matthew Rhys plays the emotionally frayed Lloyd, a man burying himself in his work at the expense of his family life, while harbouring deep resentment towards his feckless dad. When instructed by his boss to write what he dismisses as a 'puff piece' on Mister Rogers, he can't help but approach it as a kind of expose. Can the beloved children's host really be that nice a guy away from the camera? Then Lloyd meets Fred (played by Tom Hanks) and despite all his hard-wired cynicism, his world starts to transform.

(The Movie Mister Rogers)

Heller took on the project because, she said, 'it's a movie that we need right now'. It's easy to see her point. Mister Rogers' philosophy is antithetical to the mean-spiritedness that the USA and other nations are currently embracing from the top down. Of course A Beautiful Day... could have turned out a sickly shmaltz-fest, which is why the director of last year's deliciously caustic Can You Ever Forgive Me? was the perfect person for the job. Mister Rogers' world may be one of bright pastel colours, but Lloyd's is resolutely gray and there's an edginess to his early encounters with Fred that undercuts any tendency towards Lifetime Movie sentimentality. Heller knows that the emotion within this story is innate; there's no need to draw it out artificially - just give it room to breathe. And that's precisely what her film does.

The creativity breathes here too, in the delightfully meta way that Lloyd's story merges with the Mister Rogers TV show. To elaborate too much might spoil that delight, so let's just say the narrative form is left-field and a touch bizarre (with one burst of the totally surreal), but delivered with a straight face that makes it all the more touching and amusing. The structure is thematically clever too, a reminder that it's not just Rogers' young demographic who need constructive ways of processing pain and anger.

Helping steer the project to a place as mature as it is moving are Hanks and Rhys. The former was a safe pair of hands for Rogers - someone older audience members will trust with this beloved figure from their youth. It's not that Hanks is physically similar to the real guy, nor does he attempt any kind of impersonation. What he does achieve is a remarkable stillness of spirit that gets right to the core of the man people said they knew. (Watch Netflix's Fred Rogers documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? if you're in any doubt of that - it's really worth your time.) The zen-like quality of his manner is quite transfixing. Rhys is more than a foil for him, as a man who will draw on your sympathies and at times frustrate. There's a comic delight in watching how disconcerted he is in Fred's company, his presumptions founding on the rock of the man's radical kindness. 

Credit also to those who flesh out Lloyd's family drama is a way that's both gritty and affecting. Susan Kalechi Watson (Beth from This is Us) brings depth to the wife who initially pleads along with Rogers' audience fans 'Don't ruin my childhood'. And Chris 'Quality Guaranteed' Cooper humanises the erring father to touching effect. But make no mistake, this is the Tom and Matt show, with Tom stealing it. But then he does get to use hand-puppets.

To have grown up with the fictional 'Neighborhood' will no doubt enhance the viewing experience. This film does a fine job, however, of inviting in those of us who never properly knew Mister Rogers, letting us grasp what you might call the 'Rogers effect'. You know, love, kindness and the healing power of forgiveness - particularly for the one doing the forgiving. In a politically toxic age where vindictiveness and bullying are sometimes paraded as virtues, that's a message of incendiary power and this movie conveys it without ever threatening to get mawkish. The world need people like Fred Rogers right now. It needs us all to be a bit more - well - neighborly. And to think when I first saw him, I thought he wasn't cool...

Gut Reaction: It surprised me from the start and made me laugh quite a lot, sometimes the teary kind of laughter. And it made me feel just a little bit of hope for humanity.

 

Memorable Moment: Lloyd, meet Daniel Tiger. He'll change your life.

 

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. A wonderful counter-intuitive follow-up for Heller, who by the way wasn't lying. This is completely the movie we need right now.